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Journal of Ocean and Coastal Economics

Document Type

Review

Abstract

Small scale urban green infrastructure projects can provide local ecological services that should be accounted for in project assessment. Benefits assessment can be expensive and time consuming; benefit transfer provides an economical alternative, but the quality of the analysis depends upon available data. A best-case scenario for many applications of benefit transfer is to utilize a conforming meta-analysis. In this paper, we use the meta-analysis of Bockarjova, et al. (2020) to predict ecological benefits of small scale urban green infrastructure investments in Hinesville, GA. In doing so, we implement a censoring procedure on the benefit transfer function to permit analysis of small-scale (less than one-hectare) projects. We find evidence of substantial net economic benefits, with estimates ranging from $738,312 to over $5.5 million; positive benefit-to-cost ratios are robust to substantial cost increases (4 times the estimated costs). We provide guidance for how to apply these methods to other contexts.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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